Qualitative Interface Evaluation of Website Essay

Qualitative Interface Evaluation of Website - Essay Example User interface of a given product is evaluated using various techniques. The main aim of assessing the interactivity of an interface is to see the design of that interface ensures that the user is able to accomplish their tasks. The main objective of interface evaluation is to help the designers and developers of the product to minimize the malfunctions in the system, Gould and Lewis (1985) also asserts that feedback to the developers is very critical to ensure that there is an interactive process of product development. An interface is said to be good one if the users of all levels from novice to experts are able to accomplish their tasks. User interface experts have for over years been designing the best way to evaluate the interface. The evaluation therefore defines two groups; the experts and novice evaluators where each one has their level of evaluating the product within the development cycle of the program. Interactive user interface is a part of the software or the hardware t hat enables the user to interact with that product or the computer. For instance, computer users interact with the computer via software interfaces. According to Melody & Marti (2002), a web site that was poorly designed reduces the revenue and the performance of an organization. The main question is which is the best design principles for a quality website. Many evaluation techniques looks at the human daily activities and habits where the website should imitate these behavior. For a website the following are some of the criteria to be used in evaluating a website. Text elements of a website are important features that evaluators check, text should be visible with high quality but very simple to understand by the users. There should be minimal text with the web page. This is called clarity and concise. The number of links are very important too they tell us how easy is it to navigate from one page to another. There should be many ways in which the user can accomplish their tasks. T oo much external links make a bad website however. The colors which indicate that the link has been visited or not yet should be distinct and outstanding. The images in the site is also important the size and color adjustments should make it attractive. There should be interactive graphics which make users participate actively in the sites operations. Software guidelines and heuristic evaluation techniques will be used in the analysis of the site. Techniques of evaluating interface According to Afonso et al., (2011), evaluation of user interface entails measuring of how easy the interface is to learn by a new user and adopt to the environment. Learning outcomes are measured y how someone can be able to navigate from one level to another, the use of shortcuts and minimal errors. The user satisfaction is another factor in a good interface, if users yarn to use the interface once ore then it is a good one. Interface evaluation is a process that aims at establishing problems of the inte rface which is a process that requires several activities done. The techniques below are used by stakeholders of the hardware or software product at different levels such as experts and end users. Experts in UI evaluate the interface during formative evaluation while end users test the system by cognitive and pluralistic walkthrough (www.cs.umd.edu).There are several techniques used in interface evaluation such as; Heuristic evaluation